Gadgeteer: Microsoft’s open-source .NET alternative to Arduino

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Watch out Arduino, you finally have some competition: the equally-open-source and possibly-easier-to-program Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer. At its core, Gadgeteer is an ARM7-powered .NET Micro Framework-compatible family of boards and modules. Gadgeteer promises to be as simple as grabbing a mainboard, plugging in a few (solderless) modules, and programming the logic in C# using the .NET Micro Framework in Visual Studio (or the free Visual C# Express).

The first Gadgeteer-compatible mainboard and modules are the GHI’s FEZ Spider family. The mainboard is basically a 72MHz ARM system-on-a-chip with no less than 14 expansion sockets that will set you back $120. For $250, however, you can hit the prototyping-cum-gadgeteering ground running and get a bundle that includes the mainboard and 13 modules. For a complete list of the modules available, check the FEZ Spider site. Alternatively, just look at the image below (and now you know why it’s called the Spider); there’s a 3.5-inch touch screen module, some joystick button modules, an Ethernet module, a camera module, and more. Some videos showing off what you can build with Gadgeteer are embedded below.

Gadgeteer started life at Microsoft Research Cambridge, England, which needed a way of quickly prototyping gadgets and gizmos, and presumably Arduino (or Netduino) didn’t fulfill their requirements. The project quickly garnered a lot of interest amongst teachers, developers, and hobbyists alike, and thus they made Gadgeteer a public, open-source project. In this case “open source” means that the source code for the core .NET libraries that power Gadgeteer is available, and that the actual hardware itself has an open specification. In theory, an open-source platform means that you could make your own Gadgeteer-compatible mainboard and modules and sell them, just like GHI.

The main advantage of using Gadgeteer over other open platforms like Arduino is the use of .NET, C#, and Microsoft’s Visual Studio development suite — and of course the fact that Microsoft is sponsoring the project is handy, too. Arduino certainly isn’t hard to develop for, but C# and Visual Studio’s IntelliSense will lower the barrier to entry significantly, allowing students and newbies alike to get in on the action. Gadgeteer devices will also be faster to develop software for, which is rather important when rapidly developing prototypes. There’s a video embedded below which goes some way to showing you how simple Gadgeteer is to assemble and program.

Really quick…the Gadgeteer core and .NET Micro Framework (and some of the Gadgeteer component reference designs) are all open source (Apache 2.0, BSD, Creative Commons). Which is really awesome.

There are no open source Gadgeteer component drivers for things like the camera, USB Host, etc. And since the licenses are LGPL-style, manufacturers are free to close-source the open source Gadgeteer and NETMF for their solutions.

In this case, Microsoft has created the open source tech and a 3rd-party has created the first hardware. Whicih in this case is a mostly-closed-source version of Gadgeteer. This allowed Gadgeteer to become available for other researchers and academia to play with quicker (since no open source drivers needed to be created by the Microsoft Research team, they could get the core out of beta quicker).

While many of the components are closed-source (like the camera), some are protected at some point by NDA (like the WiFi module according to GHI) or patented (like the SPI modules). Also, the main controller board itself (not the socket connectors…but the EMX module) is closed-source and proprietary. A valid business model…but it can all be a bit confusing since Gadgeteer and .NET MF themselves are open source.

You can think of it like an Android phone. Samsung doesn’t give away the hardware or even necessarily the source to their version of Android…but the Android OS itself is open source. Or think of this like a version of Linux that has been customized and then closed-source.

Once open source drivers are available for Gadgeteer and the design cost comes down a bit, I expect that a number of individuals and/or companies will start building end-to-end open source solutions. It would be fun to make something like this available to open source tinkerers as well, for a singificantly lower price. I’m really looking forward to Gadgeteer version 2!

Chris

http://www.mrseb.co.uk Sebastian Anthony

Cool, thanks for the input!

Kevin Zuber

I cannot wait until the end of September, looks like I just found another hobby to blow some cash on.

google

There is another alternative for Visual Studio users who would like to program the open source Arduino boards. There is a free Arduino addin for Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 (not express). More info here http://www.visualmicro.com

loty

$80 for the main board? You can buy arduino for under $10.Non-starter.

ling maaki

i’ve been working on a c# library to interface with Arduinos, there’s a lot of good code examples in there and there should be commented well enough to help things make sense, hope that helps!